Crime of Passion (Page 1 of 3)

DISCLOSURE: Publisher Dane Baker has donated money to the Knoxville Area Committee on Central America, the group that sent Lentsch and others to protest the School of the Americas/WHINSEC. 

By Dane Baker

On a brisk, rainy night in March, dozens of people gathered at All Saints Catholic Church in West Knoxville to honor Sister Mary Dennis Lentsch. Songs were sung, speakers spoke, there was an audio/video presentation. An uninformed visitor might have easily mistaken the celebration for something else, but the 69-year-old nun isn’t retiring or taking up a new ministry out of town—she’s going to federal prison.

Lentsch, whose sentence began April 11 in Lexington, was among 31 people charged with trespassing on federal property during a massive annual protest of the School of the Americas, a military training school for Latin American military and police [note: although the SOA was renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” or WHINSEC in 2001, we adopt the original, more common name for simplicity’s sake—ed.]. Many graduates of the SOA and later WHINSEC have long been suspected of, and in some cases, charged with involvement in massacres, disappearances, and other crimes throughout Latin America for decades. Lentsch was one of nearly 20,000 people that descended on Columbus, Georgia last November to protest the school, whose curriculum and faculty roster are identical to the now-defunct SOA.

“And so I’m saying, this institution is addicted to death and violence,” Lentsch said in an interview. A thin woman with graying hair, Lentsch communicates through hand gestures just as much as through words. She has the energy of someone half her age, yet instantly puts strangers at ease with a calm confidence.

“My little act of non-violent [civil] disobedience, to step across a line here, is so insignificant to the violence and atrocities that are happening in [that] place,” she said.

“For me, when I do an act of conscience, a non-violent civil disobedience, it comes from my public witness and my religious vows,” she said. “And also it has deep roots in my call or my baptismal, Christian baptism to renounce evil and resist evil.”

But there was a time when Lentsch had a different focus. Instead of advocating change, she prepared people for the consequences of U.S. defense and foreign policy as a volunteer coordinator of civil defense shelters.

“In the late ‘60s…we were going to protect ourselves from these bombs,” she said. “And I took the classes to be a radiological manager and a shelter manager. …There were these rooms that had the [fallout shelter] symbol outside and…we would go for weekends.”

Once she moved from Iowa to East Tennessee, her perspective began to change dramatically. She started a new ministry devoted to the people of Appalachia, working with nonprofit groups to help the poorest members of the community.

“Because when I came to Campbell County, which is an area plagued by poverty…we had three year olds that came in that had never seen a crayon…and so then I realized that I must do something [for their sake],” she said.

She began demonstrating at a federal Nevada nuclear test site, and “had no support group with me, I just knew I needed to go,” she said. She was arrested, and soon turned her attention south to the School of the Americas.

How does one decide to continue civil disobedience when each new arrest means more and more jail time? For Lentsch, the decision-making process is complex.

“Oh no, you don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll go get arrested today, you know,’” she said. “I mean, who in your rational mind would want to go to prison for six months? …You know, this is a pretty rational game,” she said.

Before committing herself, the Roman Catholic nun goes through a “discernment process”: “I spend time praying and [in] solitude, and sort of listing the pros and cons; if I do this, if I don’t do it, what are they consequences, how would that effect my family, how would that effect my religious community…”